Dean Koontz - Phantoms

If he was seeing what he thought he was seeing, the thing at the window was about as large as an eagle. Which was madness.

It bashed itself against the windows with new fury, in a frenzy now, its pale wings beating so fast that it became a blur.

It moved along the dark panes, repeatedly rebounding into the night, then returning, trying feverishly to crash through the window.

Thumpthunipthumpthump. But it didn't have the strength to smash its way inside. Furthermore, it didn't have a carapace; its body was entirely soft, and in spite of its incredible size and formidable appearance, it was incapable of cracking the glass.

Thumpthumpthump.

Then it was gone.

The lights came on.

It's like a damned stage play, Bryce thought.

When they realized that the thing at the window wasn't going to return, they all moved, by unspoken consent, to the front of the room. They went through the gate in the railing, into the public area, to the windows, gazing out in stunned silence.

Skyline Road was unchanged.

The night was empty.

Nothing moved.

Bryce sat down in the caging chair at Paul Henderson's desk. The others gathered around.

"So," Bryce said.

"So," Tal said.

guy looked at one another. They fidgeted.

"Any ideas?" Bryce asked.

No one said anything.

"Any theories about what it might have been?”

"Gross," Lisa said, and shuddered.

"It was that, all right," Dr. Paige said, putting a comforting hand on her younger sister's shoulder.

Bryce was impressed with the doctor's emotional strength and resiliency.

She seemed to be taking every shock that Snowfield threw at her. Indeed, she seemed to be holding up better than his own men. Hers were the only eyes that didn't slide away when he met them; she returned his stare forthrightly.

This, he thought, is a special woman.

"Impossible," Frank Autry said." That's what it was. Just plain impossible.”

"Hell, what's the matter with you people?" Wargle asked.

He screwed up his meaty face." It was only a bird. That's all it was out there. Just a goddamned bird.”

" Like hell it was," Frank said.

"Just a lousy bird," Wargle insisted. When the others disagreed, he said, "The bad light and all them shadows out there sort of give you a false impression. You didn't see what you all think you seen.”

"And what do you think we saw?" Tal asked him.

Wargle's face became flushed.

"Did we see the same thing you saw, the thing you don't want to believe?" Tal pressed." A moth? Did you see one goddamned big, ugly impossible moth?”

Wargle looked down at his shoes." I seen a bird. Just a bird.”

Bryce realized that Wargle was so utterly lacking in imagination that the man couldn't encompass the possibility of the impossible, not even when he had witnessed it with his own eyes.

"Where did it come from?" Bryce asked.

No one had any ideas.

"What did it want?" he asked.

"It wanted us," Lisa said.

Everyone seemed to agree with that assessment.

"But the thing at the window wasn't what got Jake," Frank said." It was weak, lightweight. It couldn't carry off a grown man.”

"Then what got Jake?" Gordy asked.

"Something bigger," Frank said." Something a whole lot stronger and meaner.”

Bryce decided that, after all, the time had come to tell them about the things he had heard-and sensed-on the telephone, between his calls to Governor Reflock and General Copperfield: the silent presence; the forlorn cries of sea gulls; the warning sound of a rattlesnake; worst of all, the agonizing and despairing screams of men, women, and children.

He hadn't intended to mention any of that until morning, until the arrival of daylight and reinforcements. But they might spot something important that he had missed, some scrap, some clue that would be of help. Besides, now that they had all seen the thing at the window, the phone incident was, by comparison, no longer very shocking.

The others listened to Bryce, and this new information had a negative effect on their demeanor.

"What kind of degenerate would tape-record the screams of his victims?”

Gordy asked.

Tal Whitman shook his head." It could be something else.

It could be that..

"Yes?”

"Well, maybe none of you wants to hear this right now.”

"Since you've started it, finish it," Bryce insisted.

"Well," Tal said, "what if it wasn't a recording you heard?

I mean, we know people have disappeared from Snowfield. In fact as far as we've seen, more have vanished than died.

So… what if the missing are being held somewhere? As hostages? Maybe the screams were coming from people who were still alive, who were being tortured and maybe killed right then, right then while you were on the phone, listening.”

Remembering those terrible screams, Bryce felt his marrow slowly freezing.

"Whether it was tape-recorded or not," Frank Autry said, "it's probably a mistake to think in terms of hostages.”

"Yes," Dr. Paige said." If Mr. Autry means that we've got to be careful not to narrow our thinking to conventional situations, then I wholeheartedly agree. This just doesn't feel like a hostage drama.

Something damned peculiar is happening here, something that no one's ever encountered before, so let's not start backsliding just because we'd be more comfortable with cozy, familiar explanations. Besides, if we're dealing with terrorists, how does that fit with the thing we saw at the window? It doesn't.”

Bryce nodded." You're right. But I don't believe Tal meant that people were being held for conventional motives.”

"No, no," Tal said." It doesn't have to be terrorists or kidnappers.

Even if people are being held hostage, that doesn't necessarily mean other people are holding them. I'm even willing to consider that they're being held by something that isn't human. How's that for remaining open-minded? Maybe it is holding them, the it that none of us can define. Maybe it's holding them just to prolong the pleasure it takes from snuffing the life out of them. Maybe it's holding them just to tease us with their screams, the way it teased Bryce on the phone.

Hell, if we're dealing with something truly extraordinary, truly unhuman, its reasons for holding hostages-if it is holding any-are bound to be incomprehensible.”

"Christ, you're talking like lunatics," Wargle said.

Everyone ignored him.

They had stepped through the looking glass. The impossible was possible. The enemy was the unknown.

Lisa Paige cleared her throat. Her face was pasty. In a barely audible voice, she said, "Maybe it spun a web somewhere, down in a dark place, in a cellar or a cave, and maybe it tied all the missing people into its web, sealed them up in cocoons, alive. Maybe it's just saving them until it gets hungry again.”

If absolutely nothing lay beyond the realm of possibility, if even the most outrageous theories could be true, then perhaps the girl was right, Bryce thought. Perhaps there was an enormous web vibrating softly in some dark place, hung with a hundred or two hundred or even more manand woman- and child-size tidbits, wrapped in individual packages for freshness and convenience. Somewhere in Snowfield, were there living human beings who had been reduced to the awful equivalent of foil-wrapped Pop Tarts, waiting only to provide nourishment for some brutal, unimaginably evil, darkly intelligent, other dimensional horror.

No. Ridiculous.

On the other hand: maybe.

Jesus.

Bryce crouched in front of the shortwave radio and squinted at its mangled guts. Circuit boards had been snapped. Several parts appeared to have been crushed in a vice or hammered flat.

Frank said, "They had to take off the cover plate to get at all this stuff, just the way we did.”